Sorry I havent given you all an update! I am still in school and it is pretty much impossible to take leave to go home! So heres a very quick update. I am at ASchool which is my technical training on how to do my job which is an aviation warfare specialist operator, which means in english that i will be a radar operator on P-3s hunting for submarines. It sounds so interesting right? Its great because I will never have to go on sea duty or touch a ship so that is very convenient. I should be graduating school late November then going to SERE school in Maine for 2 weeks then to a fleet replacement squadron in jacksonville. anyway...currently our whole base is getting evacuated because of this hurricane ivan! it is very annoying trying to get flood ready but thats what the Navy does best I guess! haha So we will be going north to Albany, GA for who knows how long! Other than that I am doing well. Just enjoying the beach, not liking the humidity, missing the mountains, and making new friends and getting great training! I love and miss all my friends and family! I wanna come homeee!!! <3 more later!

This is my life since I left for Navy boot camp on March 27, 2012. I arrived at Great Lakes, IL and I was thrown into a world I had never seen before. I was rushed off the bus in to a building and lined up and told what to do and when to do it. I got one phone call to my family to let them know that I had gotten there safely. Once that happened, we went into a big room and sat down and waited for hours on end to do paper work, we got stripped of all our personal belongings, were issued navy uniforms which at that time consisted of PT shorts and shirt and the navy sweats and sweatshirt. we also got issued everything from our shampoo to underwear and socks. It sucked! at that moment i knew it was too late to ever go back to the way life was. not only was i uncomfortable with the surrounding environment, but the petty officers that were there were calling us names i had never heard before and saying things in such a way that i just felt soooo degraded. they would call all the males "guy" and girls "females" which you would think wouldnt be that bad, but they way that they said it just made me feel like the lowest animal on the food chain. and of course as you can imagine every single cuss word in the world was used. after getting lots of briefs about what was expected and what we would be expecting at boot camp, we were put into divisions which was around 80 people. I was chosen to be in a 900 division, div 928 which means that i was a triple threat division consisting of a band, choir, and drill team.  I was on the drill team which was spinning rifles and doing different tricks. we got to meet every saturday for 4 hours in the morning and practice, which was nice because it got us out of our compartment and away from our RDC's which were our recruit division commanders. my rdc's were the most crazy and random people that i had ever met. my chief was a very small 5ft black woman who im pretty sure was a lesbian. she was a corpsman which is basically medical personnel who was also a trained with the marines and she was very skilled in the art of messing with peoples minds. and trust me she did plenty of that. i dont think i had ever been so intimidated by such a small person in my life! then i had a male rdc Petty Officer first class, who happened to be a boatswain mate, which is someone who handles all the lines on the ship and ties down the planes and helps to get the ship underway and pull into port. he was very smart and he always pushed us to be the best division we could be. he was very tough but looking back at it i appreciate all of the things that he taught us. then my last rdc was Petty Officer first class. she was also a black woman who wore different wigs almost every day haha she was sooooo hillarious! she would say the most random things and just make us all laugh. when she was teaching us things every other word was mother F&^%$#. it was hilarious. she as also the only rdc who didnt like beating us. speaking of beatings... we would get ITd which is intensive training for hours on end most days. any little screw up, we would have to do jumping jacks, push ups, sit ups, 8 counts, burpees, lunges, and any other form of physical punishment you could think of! it sucked because we new nothing about the navy but were expected to know everything so we got very fit in boot camp. we were known as the IT division. even when we would do a great job...our rdcs would find any little excuse to punish us. by the end i was over being scared of getting beat and just look at as free personal training! ohhh i forgot to mention, once we got to our temporary compartment which was the place that we slept for the first week, my second rdc POJ, told me to watch the first RCPO which means recruit chief petty officer, who happened to be a girl that was randomly chosen to fill the position, but he told me to watch everything that she did and to learn from what he taught her, at the time i had no idea why he said that but a week or so later when we went to the pool to get swim qualified he told me that if she didnt pass her swim that i would become RCPO. low and behold she failed her swim and literally at the pool my chief pulled me out, put a cutlass (it was used as an enlisted weapon in the early days of the navy now its just a sword that all rcpos carry to protect our division) and told me that i was the new rcpo. It was a huge responsibility and i was scared out of my mind! because i was the bridge between my rdcs and my division. anything that anyone else screwed up on, it was automatically my fault and i got beat for it! but there were some perks to having the job, i got advanced from e2-e3 which is kinda a big deal, i got to make all the calls whenever we marched in formation anywhere, and everyone had to listen to everything that i said! so that was pretty cool. boot camp wasnt all bad all the time. there were some awesome things that we got to do. we learned how to fight fires on ships, got marksman qualified, we went to different classes and learned different things about ships, we got to have what was called BASES on saturdays for PT where we got to pt with other divisions and rotate through fun work out stations. we also got to compete in whats called captains cup which is just different physical events like pushups, sit ups, pull ups, a relay, and there was a chant competition to see who could come up with the best chant and stuff like that and we actually won the physical part of it which is odd for a 900div because we are pinned as the band geeks but we actually had a pretty fit division. so i actually got to meet the captain of the command and it was really cool i got to shake his hand as he gave me this giant trophie that we got to carry around and put on our table at chow. along with pt and practicing for our performances we also had to do different inspections like our racks got inspected in zone where they would literally throw everything out of our racks onto the floor and check and make sure that we had stenciled our name on them right and that they were folded correctly. there is one thing that i will say that boot camp taught me, which is how to fold my laundry a very different way than i used to! haha but we also had drill inspections which was basically just a test for me and my division on making turns and me making calls to guide my division where we needed to go. we also had to go through a drill tape where my division would only make a few movements, coming to attention, going to parade rest, but i had so many cues to make with my cutlass, like saluting, going to parade rest, and it was the most nerve racking thing ever! but we did pretty good except for our competitive muster, my yeoman missed some commas ( which is a big deal apparently) and we got a 4.6 out of 5, which im sure you can imagine but we got beat for hours because we didnt 5.0! stupid!  anyway to wrap up boot camp at the end we had what was called battle stations where we were put to the ultimate test of knowledge and we went on this huge ship that was built just like a real ship with different rooms and we had to do firefighting and get us out of port and we basically just ran around the ship finding different rooms in full battle dress doing different things. we had to stay awake all night and once we were done, we were done with boot camp basically because that was in our 7th week of camp. after that it was smooth sailing till graduation. I graduated on May 27th and my mom and dad came down and we toured around Chicago and then i came here to Pensacola fl for aircrew candidate school. i checked in to NACCS which is Naval air crew candidate school on may 28th and i started class shortly after. naccs consisted of a lottt of pt! we would work out in the mornings then we would go to the pool in the afternoon and learn how to swim with all parts of our flight gear on, helmet, flight suit, gloves, boots, and flight vests. it sucked haha but we got to jump off a 10ft tower and that was pretty cool. we also got hands on training in different simulators such as the heilo dunker, which was a huge cockpit that was on cables suspended over a pool that had 8 seats in it. we were put in full flight gear and had to be strapped into the dunker then we were submerged under water and flipped upside down and had to get out of our seat belts and swim to the top. it was so scary the first time but it was good training. we also learned how to get out of our parachutes in the water in case we ever had to jump out. we also were put in flight simulators called the spin and puke because it made us feel like we were in a fast plane, and other survival classes. i got first aid and cpr certified which is very handy to have. after all that schooling which is about a month long, i graduated naccs and moved over to the other side of base for my A School where i actually learn the specific rate that i was given which is AWO or Aviation Warfare systems operator. my a school is 17 weeks long so needless to say i will be in Florida for a long time! i am expected to graduate November 15th, but after this school i go to SERE which is basically a wilderness survival class where they beat you up literally and teach you what to do in case i ever become a pow and then throw us in the woods for a week and say ok here ya go survive for a week! im not looking forward to that. but its only 2 weeks long. after that i go to jacksonville, fl for more fleet training where i get qualified to fly and start real time training for my job as an acoustic operator which basically means that i track subs through sonar buoys and then once we find them we blow them up. its an easy job that apparently i get a lot of money for! im pretty excited for that! so right now i am just trying to enjoy school and the beach and just learn as much as i can while im here. I have a wonderful boyfriend who is also aircrew, who i have been dating for 2 weeks now. he is from maine and he is just the sweetest guy i have ever met! i have met a lot of awesome people who have come and gone and taught me a lot about the navy and life. before i joined i had no idea how much i would actually be giving up, but i have given up a lot to gain a lot. my ultimate goal in the navy is to become a pilot which i have to become an officer first but that will take some time. well thats all for now!